Church plans park clean-up

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Members of Lawrence's Vineyard Church will be heading outdoors on Saturday to show their love for the environment.The church is helping to organize "Keep it Clean," a clean-up day at Centennial Park at Ninth and Iowa streets. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, and anyone is welcome to help out. There's even a free lunch in the deal."As Christians, we believe God created the world," says Rob Martin, the church's pastor. "After he was done, he called it good. Unfortunately, we don't have a great track record of taking care of it. Our primary reason for doing it (the clean-up) is to show God that we take what he made seriously."He also wants to send a message to others that churches do care about the environment.The two-year-old church, part of the national Vineyard USA network, is planning additional environmental activism down the road."We have stripped (the environment), burned it, abused it," Martin says. "God gave it to us to take care of. We don't worship the environment because that would be worshipping the created instead of the creator, but we are to take care of it."The Journal-World's Faith Forum question on Saturday deals with the Bible and environmentalism. Local faith leaders Vicki Penner and Doug Heacock answer the question, "What does Scripture say about caring for the Earth?"_ Faith Files, which examines issues of faith, spirituality, morals and ethics, is updated by features/faith reporter Terry Rombeck. Have an idea for the blog? Contact Terry at trombeck@ljworld.com, or 832-7145._

I think these postive posts on religious activism are great. It is nice to see people doing positive things with their religion and only fair.

However, I am curious: will there be any interfaith dialogoue on faith files? Religion has received a lot of heat lately from books like The End of Faith, The God Delusion, and God is Not Great. And the religious world is becoming a lot smaller a lot faster due to the Internet (case in point). This necessitates a lot of negotiation and discussion among people who would otherwise not talk to each other (e.g. atheists, buddhists, christians, and muslims).